Plateau? "Sound it out."

I specifically remember a time when I mispronounced a word in fourth grade. We were in geography class, popcorn reading our textbook, and it was my turn. I was a very proficient reader and usually loved reading out loud to show off my skills. However, on this particular day, in this particular unit, there was a new word for me—one that I had heard before, but had never seen in writing—one I could not sound out letter by letter. The word was “plateau.” I was reading loud and proud and tried to keep my cool when approaching the word. I tried to maintain my rhythm of confident reading as I frantically sounded it out in my head. Out of my mouth came the word “plat-TAY-yoo” and even before any of the other nine and ten year olds in my class started laughing, I knew that it didn’t sound right.

Popcorn reading is belittling for this reason. If I had been reading this on my own, I could have tried it a few different ways without the pressure of an audience. If I had thought about the context, or looked at the landscape diagram in the picture I could have figured it out. There is no way to sound out “plateau” in English, yet there are other avenues I could have gone to figure it out.

Whether or not you grew up using “sound it out” as your reading strategy for difficult words, you are probably familiar with it. You make the sound of each letter in a tricky word, blend the sounds together, and are able to say the word. Right? As it turns out, you cannot effectively “sound out” 40 to 50 percent of the English language. It really makes you wonder why the National Reading Panel Report and No Child Left Behind advocate systematic synthetic phonics (Compton-Lilly, 2005).

What children, parents, and teachers need to know is that there are other strategies for figuring out tricky words that are much more helpful. There are visual and structural cues to pick up on, as well as thinking about the meaning of what the words say together. Readers can ask themselves, “Does it look right?” along with, “Does it sound right?” and of course, “Does it make sense?” As fluent speakers, children have a great understanding of their language in spoken form—they can use this to their benefit when it comes to written language.

When helping a child learn to read, it is crucial to not only model different strategies for figuring out words, but to call those strategies what they are. It may sound obvious, but if you are demonstrating how to look at the structure of the sentence to check to see if a word looks right, you would not call this “sounding it out” because that is not what you are doing. Similarly, if you are breaking the word into chunks that you know and saying the sounds together, explain that you are doing that. If you are looking at the picture or the rest of the words for clues as to what a certain word is, then explain that. If children hear adults repeatedly tell them to “sound it out” when they mean something else, then the child is at a loss of what to do.

 

As Johnson and Keier (2010) say in their book, Catching Readers Before They Fall,

“If we expect children to predict, search for, and gather information from the various sources of information; reread; and check and confirm predictions, then we need to model how to do those things” (p. 67).